Philip
Larkin 22 - died 1985. Preferred to avoid limelight/professional librarians
libraries. Uri of Hull.
●
The north ship.
●
The dess deceived.
●
The Witsun woodings.
●
High windows.
Four
slender volumes that appeared at almost decade-long intervals.
Technically
brilliant
Rhyme,
stanza/meter (modern age)
Reasonably beautiful,
profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any
English poet in the last 25 years.
● Avoided the literary, the metropolitan,
the group label cultivated the non-literary, the provincial, the purely
personal.
● Refused to be taken in by inflated
nations of art and life.
●
Writes
about failures, remorses of age, stunted lives, spoiled desires. Colloquial
language.
●
Familiar english lyric.
●
Drastically
limited in its sense of any life, before or after. Life today in
England.
● Declared being ignorant of foreign
literature, including American poetry.
● Early years as “unspent” and
“boring”. Coventry - poor eye sight and stutter.
● Enrolled in Oxford, where he met his
pears, including Kinsley Amis, John Wain.
● He worked in different university
libraries and moved to Hull in 1955 - 35 years admired for the expansion of the
library.
